MSI Fusion board tested, praised, loved

The guys over at Hardwareheaven have managed to get their hands on MSI’s new E35OIA-E45 Fusion board and put it through its paces.

The tiny mini-ITX board packs AMD’s new E-350 1.6GHz APU, which is more than enough to wipe the floor with any Intel Atom system. The HD 6310 graphics scored E468 in 3Dmark 11 and the core proved powerful enough to run Fallout Las Vegas in sub-HD with low detail levels. Of course, the Fusion platform is not aimed at gamers, but you could get away with some casual gaming.

The CPU isn’t powerful enough to make use of high-end graphics, but there’s a PCIe x16 slot on board, so it is possible to upgrade the graphics should you be compelled to do so. The CPU did not deliver impressive results in encoding tests, either. However, applications that managed to harness the GPU did much better.

The system consumed between 50W and 61W of power depending on the load and the APU heated up to 62C under full load. This is pretty good, as there’s not much need for active cooling so the entire system is rather quiet. All in all, AMD’s new platform is very promising to say the least. If vendors manage to keep the price around €100, AMD could have winner on its hands.